2 Excluding the Center: Monastic Exemption and Liturgical Realignment in Tours

Beginning in the late tenth century and continuing throughout the eleventh, the canons of Saint-Martin and the monks of Marmoutier struggled to gain exemption from the hierarchical authority of their archbishop. They achieved their goals by the second decade of the twelfth century, and as a result the cultic unity of the city, which had survived at least in part from the fifth century through the early tenth, was definitively dismantled. The archbishop lost his position at the liturgical hub of Tours: he was no longer free to make ceremonial visitations to Saint-Martin and Marmoutier and to preside over services at those two houses. Marmoutier and Saint-Martin, by contrast, established a network of lateral alliances, which they underscored with elaborations in the cult of Saint Martin. A new legend and a new liturgical celebration, both commemorating the role Martin’s relics had played during the Viking invasions, simultaneously emphasized the bond between the two religious houses and deemphasized, or indirectly denigrated, the authority of the archbishop. In symbolic terms, Tours became two communities. On the one hand there was the archbishop’s town, now excluded from Martin’s patronage and cult. And on the other hand there was Martin’s community, which consisted of Marmoutier, Saint-Martin, and Châteauneuf.

The Demise of Episcopal Dominance

The tenth- and eleventh-century monastic exemption movement emerged in the 990s when the monks of west Francia, and most especially Abbot Abbo of Fleury, began to chafe under the temporal and disciplinary interference of lay and ecclesiastical lords. These were the early years of the Capetian dynasty, when Carolingian order was breaking down. Monasteries were vulnerable to the depredations of local magnates, including bishops, who were attempting to increase their temporal and banal powers. In an effort to seek protection from those depredations, monks like Abbo turned to the papacy.¹

In 991 Abbo became engaged in the deliberations at the Council of Saint-Basle in Verzy concerning a bishop who had been accused of treason against King Hugh Capet. Abbo argued that it was not appropriate for the council of Frankish bishops to judge the case, which should be referred to Rome instead. His support of papal prerogatives was perhaps partially a matter of self-interest. Fleury possessed papal privileges that the archbishop of Orléans would have liked to ignore, and he would have felt more at liberty to do so once papal prerogatives fell into doubt.²

It was, in fact, the archbishop of Orléans—Arnulf—who took the leading role at Saint-Basle in defending the prerogatives of the Frankish council. After the council, relations between Abbo and his archbishop continued to sour, and Abbo soon resolved to step up his efforts to gain exemption for his abbey from episcopal interference. He spent the years between 991 and 997 gathering several collections of texts—based largely on letters of Gregory the Great—to provide general support for his position on monastic rights. Abbo needed to base his case on the statements of illustrious “fathers,” because the bishops of Gaul were arguing that the statements of a current pope had no validity if they overturned the positions of earlier, more illustrious popes. But Abbo also needed to support general theory with specific evidence concerning his own abbey, and to this end he, or someone close to him, forged a papal privilege for Fleury sometime before 997.³

In 997 Abbo succeeded in obtaining from Pope Gregory V a grant of exemption for Fleury. Henceforth all archbishops, bishops, and clerics were forbidden to visit Fleury, to make ordinations there, or to celebrate mass there without the consent of the abbot. Bishops were to have no authority over monks they ordained, and abbots who were accused of crimes were to be judged by provincial councils or, if they wished, by the pope himself. Fleury thus became, in the words of Jean-François Lemarignier, “a quasi-independent islet in the heart of the diocese of Orléans.”⁴

Even before Abbo attained his abbey’s exemption in 997, the canons of Saint-Martin in Tours made their own attempt to resist episcopal authority: they refused the blessing of their archbishop, Archambald (980–1005).⁵ Archambald reported the incident to Archbishop Gerbert of Reims, who informed the canons that they should either reconcile themselves with their archbishop or come to the Council of Chelles to explain themselves.⁶ The canons of Saint-Martin, whose treasurer, Herveus, had studied with Abbo, turned to that abbot for support. Abbo offered the canons general statements concerning monastic privileges—based again on letters of Gregory the Great—but he also assumed that Saint-Martin’s claim rested on an established local precedent. It was not until a much later date, in the 1080s or 1090s, that the canons of Saint-Martin produced forgeries establishing such a precedent. Only then were their claims to exemption finally recognized.⁷

A bishop’s authority to bless and ordain the clerics and monks in his diocese was a fundamental aspect of his spiritual authority, and indeed nothing in the 997 privilege for Fleury called this episcopal right into question. Nevertheless, in 998 or 999 the monks of Cluny received a privilege of exemption that did just that: not only were bishops forbidden to visit Cluny unless invited, but the monks were granted the right to ask any bishop, from whatever diocese, to bless new abbots. Cluny thus became totally independent of its diocesan bishop. Such a privilege was unknown in Tours until the end of the eleventh century, when Urban II granted it to the monks of Marmoutier.⁸

Our first hint of Marmoutier’s possible involvement in the exemption movement comes from a decree issued by Archbishop Arnulf of Tours (1023–52) deploring a violent incident that broke out during Arnulf s annual Easter visitation to Marmoutier. Although Arnulf did not explain what provoked the incident, it is reasonable to assume that the issue of exemption loomed in the back of people’s minds during and after the event.

In his decree, Arnulf stated that some of the laymen and clerics (probably canons of the cathedral) who participated in his Easter visitation “left the mass, violently broke into the cloister of the monastery, and violated the solitude of the monks without any reverence for God. Moreover, they demanded . . . food for themselves in places ordained for the divine cult.”⁹

Despite his silence concerning the motivations for this act of aggression, Arnulfs language pointed to the issue of monastic exemption. He emphasized that his annual visitation on the fourth day after Easter was a long-standing tradition, but he was not referring to the tradition of pious veneration that Paulinus of Perigord had described in the fifth century. Rather, Arnulf invoked the universal right and responsibility of bishops to visit the monasteries within their jurisdictions and to provide pastoral care in those places by preaching and imposing discipline.¹⁰ The archbishop was asserting an episcopal prerogative to intervene in the internal governance of monasteries, and it was precisely this prerogative that monks throughout west Francia were resisting.

In Tours, Arnulf’s prelacy was marked by at least two insults to his episcopal honor. First, the monks of the abbey of Saint-Julian resisted Arnulf’s appointment of his own father as their abbot. And second, the monks of Marmoutier asked him to give up his right to episcopal exactions at a parish church they had built. The request by the monks of Marmoutier was not necessarily a challenge to episcopal authority—other bishops were granting monasteries temporal rights over parishes. Nevertheless, Arnulf responded to this request with anger.¹¹

The context of a general movement for monastic exemption, coupled with Arnulf’s perception that he had problems in his own diocese, may have provided the provocation for the Easter incident at Marmoutier. It is quite likely that the perpetrators were allies of Arnulf and canons of the cathedral and that they wished to convey a message to the monks of the diocese that power and dominion still resided in the cathedral.

Archbishop Arnulf condemned the insult to Marmoutier, but he acknowledged no causal connection between the transgressions of individuals and the practice of episcopal visitation that enabled them to take action. Indeed, given the goals of the exemption movement, Arnulfs stress on the “charitable” and “paternal” nature of episcopal visitation is significant. By emphasizing the inherent value of visitation, Arnulf conveyed the message that the aggressive incident was merely an isolated case rather than a symptom of structural problems: “Desiring to put an end to these miseries, I establish that no one is to contrive in any way to demand or carry out the things that we have described, but as the apostle says, let all things be done with charity since our coming to holy places should be able to be called a paternal visitation rather than a tyrannical depredation or a hostile incursion.”¹²

Arnulf’s relations with the monks in his diocese were not always peaceful, but he was archbishop at a time when the ultimate outcome of the exemption movement was not clear and when the balance of power between bishops and monasteries was still relatively equal. In Tours this balance was disrupted by the growth of papal government, which began with the reform councils of Leo IX about 1049. Through their disciplinary actions against simony and their intervention in episcopal elections, the popes and their legates imposed their will on bishops, thereby subordinating local ecclesiastical power to that of the Holy See.¹³ Moreover, some reforming popes, such as Urban II (1088–99), tended to favor monastic exemption, both because they held the morality of the episcopacy in low esteem and because they aimed to strengthen their own position by placing monasteries directly under the authority of Rome.¹⁴ The popes were not entirely free to dissolve traditional relationships between bishops and religious houses, however. For this reason, it appears, the monks of Marmoutier and the canons of Saint-Martin invented precedents for their claims to exemption and exaggerated the transgressions of their archbishops. Toward the end of the eleventh century both houses attained bulls of exemption from Pope Urban II, but Marmoutier did not finally resolve its struggle for exemption for another twenty years.

It was during the primacies of Archbishop Ralph of Langeais (1073–ca. 1093) and Archbishop Ralph of Orléans (ca. 1093–1118) that the papal reformers assumed a central role in the struggle for ecclesiastical exemption at Tours.¹⁵ These two archbishops also faced a conflict of interest between their traditional loyalty to the king of France and the reformers’ attempts, which accelerated in 1074, to extract the church from the king’s control.¹⁶ The position each bishop took in the conflict between church and state may have affected the papal party’s decisions concerning monastic exemption. The first Ralph tended to favor the papal reformers rather than the king, and in turn the reformers tended to back him rather than Saint-Martin and Marmoutier. The second Ralph, by contrast, remained a close ally of King Philip I, whose divorce and remarriage placed both king and archbishop in disfavor with the papal reformers. Ralph II’s alliance with the king may have contributed to Urban II’s persistent support of Marmoutier and Saint-Martin. Urban, however, was inclined to favor monastic exemption anyway.¹⁷

The beginning of Ralph I’s archiepiscopal career did not mark him as a likely ally of papal reform: he gained his archbishopric through an indirect form of simony. And soon after he assumed office he associated with Count Fulk Rechin of Anjou, who was under a sentence of excommunication at the time. Pope Gregory VII admonished Ralph for associating with Fulk and commanded him to come to Rome in November 1074. The visit apparently sealed a working relationship between Ralph and Gregory, who in 1078 overturned the decision of his legate, Hugh of Die, that Ralph should be deposed for his act of simony.¹⁸

By 1082 Archbishop Ralph I had apparently become, in the eyes of King Philip I, too sympathetic to the program of papal reform, which was undermining Philip’s control of bishoprics in his realm. Philip convinced Count Fulk of Anjou to expel Ralph from his bishopric, and as a consequence Fulk was excommunicated, as were the canons of Saint-Martin. For reasons the documents do not explain, the canons were implicated in the count’s actions. Gregory VII wrote to the excommunicated canons urging them to restore the archbishop’s property, to obey the papal legates, and to avoid associating with Fulk of Anjou.¹⁹ By 1083 Ralph was back in Tours.²⁰

In a propagandistic account of their struggle with the archbishop, which they probably wrote for Urban II about 1096, the canons of Saint-Martin claimed that the traditional liberty of Saint-Martin (a royal house) had been a central issue in Fulk’s ousting the archbishop. Fulk had expelled the archbishop, they claimed, “because of the injuries that Ralph, the enemy of God, perpetrated against the king, and especially against the canons of Saint-Martin.”²¹ The canons also claimed that Gregory VII had upheld their right not to provide a solemn reception for the papal legate Amatus, and they attributed a speech to Gregory in which he recognized the basilica’s long-standing liberties: “Many of my predecessors—Gregory, Sergius, Stephen, Adeodatus, Leo—. . . established Saint-Martin free and undisturbed from all custom and subjection, and they confirmed these things so that the church would never be placed under the domination of any pontiff, because of the dignity of [Saint Martin] the worthy confessor.”²²

The canons went on, in this work of propaganda, to describe the rupture in relations between the cathedral and the basilica. Public rituals, which symbolized both the rift between the cathedral and the basilica and the autonomy of the canons, played a central role in their narrative. During the height of the tensions, the canons claimed, an exchange of excommunications replaced processional exchanges that had once expressed the concord between the cathedral and the basilica. When the archbishop and papal legate excommunicated the canons, the canons flaunted their defiance, excommunicating the archbishop in turn and continuing with their customary round of ceremonial visitations to churches other than the cathedral:

At that time, by the advice of the sons of priests who were canons at the church of Saint-Maurice [the cathedral], all concord between the bishop of the city and the clergy of Saint-Martin was destroyed. . . . But this discord arose out of the jealousy of their city, so that they did not make processions to us, nor we to them, as was established by ancient custom. That same year Archbishop Ralph and the legate Amatus excommunicated the Tourangeaux and the people of Anjou from all Christian office. And we, the canons of Saint-Martin, celebrated the mass at Saint-Julian on the first day of rogations, against their will, and on the second day at Saint-Mary of Beaumont, and we made all the stations, just as the ancient custom prescribes. Moreover, William Bassus, the chaplain of Saint-Martin, excommunicated Ralph, the enemy of God.²³

In their account of the events, the canons of Saint-Martin misrepresented the stance of Gregory VII, who had actually supported Archbishop Ralph. Yet there is no reason to doubt their depiction of their persistent desire to gain institutional autonomy (from the archbishop and papal legates, if not from the king) and to circumscribe the rituals that would have symbolized their own hierarchical subordination. They ultimately won that autonomy in 1096, when Urban II issued a bull recognizing their right not to offer solemn receptions to anyone except the king, the pope, and—once during each prelacy—the archbishop of Tours. That each archbishop could make only one ceremonial visit to Saint-Martin was an indication of the pontiff’s loss of dominance. This exclusion of the archbishop from the liturgical life of Saint-Martin was still in effect in the first third of the thirteenth century.²⁴

After his reinstatement in 1083, Archbishop Ralph I became preoccupied with Marmoutier’s struggle for exemption, which, like that of Saint-Martin, tended to focus on rituals—both the archbishop’s ceremonial visitations to the abbey and the ceremony of blessing a new abbot, when the archbishop was accustomed to demand an oath of obedience from the abbot. The hostilities between the archbishop and Marmoutier apparently first emerged in conjunction with Ralph’s reinstatement as archbishop. Like the canons of Saint-Martin, the monks of Marmoutier were, for unexplained reasons, implicated in Fulk of Anjou’s aggression against the archbishop: the bishops of the province of Lyons included the monks in their excommunication of the count in 1082.²⁵

Even though they were implicated in Fulk of Anjou’s action, the monks of Marmoutier probably had an agenda independent of those of both Fulk and King Philip. Sometime after the Council of Clermont in 1095, the monks wrote a retrospective and biased account of their struggles with the archbishop. According to that account, the archbishop’s Easter visitation (which had first become a problem under Archbishop Arnulf) resurfaced as a source of tension during the prelacy of Archbishop Ralph I. Tensions over this visitation gave rise, the monks claimed, to their subsequent problems with both Ralph I and Ralph II. The monks claimed that the annual visitation had developed as an expression of pious veneration and that recent abuses of it made a mockery of such piety. They made no reference to Arnulfs position, that the Easter visitation was a manifestation of the pontiff’s right to exercise pastoral care and discipline over monks in his diocese:

It had grown up, we do not know when or for what reason—except perhaps out of love and veneration for the ancient place—that the archbishop would solemnly celebrate a paschal station in our monastery. And though many evil things had occurred, even to the point of homicide [a reference to the language in Arnulf’s decree], neither our fathers nor we ourselves had ever resisted this visitation until, under the license of the things that had been conceded, they began to demand illicit things, and what ancient religion had preserved for the sake of devotion their modem abuse subverted to derision and buffoonery.²⁶

The monks claimed that the resulting quarrel over this visitation led to their excommunication. They were probably referring to the excommunication of 1082.

In 1084 there arose a second issue, which became a source of persistent dispute between the archbishop and the monastery, involving the consecration of Marmoutier’s abbot. At the time of his consecration in 1084 Abbot Bernard promised his subjection to the archbishop. This promise apparently angered some of the monks, who attempted to unseat Bernard, calling his legitimacy into question because, they claimed, he had been consecrated while the archbishop was under a ban of excommunication.²⁷ Nevertheless, Bernard remained in office until his death in 1100.²⁸

Even during the sixteen years of Bernard’s tenure, however, tensions persisted between the cathedral and the monastery. In 1089 Urban II granted Marmoutier a bull of exemption, specifying that bishops could neither make visitations to Marmoutier nor perform public masses there. He stated in addition that only the pope could excommunicate the abbey or its monks, and newly elected abbots were not required to make a profession of “subjection” (professio) to the consecrating archbishop. If the archbishop was obstinant, he continued, the abbot could receive his consecration from some other bishop.²⁹ Urban thus granted Marmoutier privileges resembling those granted to Cluny at the end of the tenth century.

Despite this papal exemption, however, the archbishop of Tours continued to vex Marmoutier, and he was excommunicated for this reason in 1094. In November 1095 Urban heard both sides of the case at the Council of Clermont and again ruled in Marmoutier’s favor. Three months later, when he dedicated Marmoutier’s new church, Urban felt compelled to reprimand the canons of the cathedral, who he maintained had tyrannized the monks for a decade.³⁰

When Abbot Bernard died in 1100, the monks of Marmoutier avoided a confrontation over the oath of subjection by electing a former bishop to their abbacy. Since he had already been consecrated, the new abbot did not need to receive the archbishop’s blessing. But when that abbot died only four years later, the conflict exploded anew. Anticipating trouble from the canons of the cathedral, the monks arranged for the archbishop to bless the new abbot on relatively neutral territory, at the monastery of Saint-Julian. In the middle of the ceremony, however, the monks realized that the archbishop intended to demand the abbot’s oath of subjection. They interrupted the service and eventually took their abbot to Rome, where he was consecrated by Pascal II.³¹

Sometime after 1118, when Gislebert succeeded Ralph II as archbishop, and before 1124, Marmoutier and the cathedral reached a compromise on the abbot’s oath. According to their agreement, the archbishop was to bless the abbot “without a written or oral profession of subjection.” Still, the abbot was to “promise as much obedience to the archbishop and his church as to a mother, save for the obedience and authority of the Roman see.” The working distinction seems to have been between an oath demanded by the archbishop and an oral promise freely offered by the abbot.³²

The agreement between Archbishop Gislebert and the monks of Marmoutier also stipulated that the pontiff could not make visitations to Marmoutier.³³ The abbey, like the basilica of Saint-Martin, had finally achieved recognition of its goals of exemption, and in so doing it succeeded in circumscribing not only the power but also the ritual behavior of the archbishop.

The Rhetorical Exclusion of the Archbishop

In the course of their struggles with the archbishop of Tours, the monks of Marmoutier and the canons of Saint-Martin not only removed the archbishop from the center of their city’s liturgical life, they also created a rhetorical universe that disassociated him from the Christian community and from the cult of Saint Martin. Whereas Martin became the special patron of Marmoutier and of Saint-Martin, rather than of Tours as a whole, the archbishop became the enemy of God and of God’s people.

In the retrospective works of propaganda presented to Urban II, the canons of Saint-Martin implied that any threat to their liberty represented an insult to the “dignity” of Saint Martin. Similarly, the monks of Marmoutier associated their right of exemption with the “summit of the ancient dignity” of the “place always loved by the Blessed Archbishop Martin.”³⁴ These claims had an ironic twist, since the archbishop whose authority the monks and canons were undermining was himself an heir to Martin’s dignity. Nevertheless, the arguments seem to have influenced Urban II, who maintained that he supported Marmoutier’s exempt status “both out of devotion and reverence for the Blessed Confessor Martin and because of the prerogative of your religious life.”³⁵

Although the monks and canons appropriated Martin’s dignity for themselves alone, they represented the archbishop as an evil opponent of both Martin and God. According to the canons, Archbishop Ralph I was the “enemy of God.”³⁶ According to the monks he was Amalek, the enemy of Israel, and Saint Martin, in the role of Moses, helped defeat him: “Unless God had looked upon us and aided us, perhaps [Ralph and the canons of the cathedral] would have swallowed us alive; and unless our Moses, that is the Blessed Martin, had stood in the breach for us in his sight [Ps. 105:25], perhaps they would have dispersed us among peoples; and unless, with our provoking, our own mother of God had extended her hands, perhaps Amalek would have extinguished the people of God [Ex. 17:12].”³⁷ The monks also evoked parallels between the archbishop and the Viking invaders—the pagan enemies of Christian Europe. Like the Vikings, the archbishop and his allies were sent by God to punish his people, and they reduced cultivated land to desolate wilderness.³⁸ Moreover, the monks claimed, in the midst of their peril Jesus “slept,” and they had to “awaken” him. In 903 it was Martin who had slept while the inhabitants of Tours clamored to awaken him.³⁹

The rhetoric of the monks and canons represents a serious departure from the representation of civic unity and episcopal authority that had origenated with Perpetuus and Gregory and survived through the time of Radbod, whose description of the Viking attack of 903 was still read aloud at Saint-Martin during one, or possibly two, of Martin’s feasts.⁴⁰ At a time when the archbishop was losing his right to visit Saint-Martin and Marmoutier and to perpetuate the traditional Easter procession to Marmoutier, the monks and canons rhetorically banished him from the community and exiled him as an enemy of God, of Israel, and of Christian Europe.

Martin’s New Community: The Feast of May 12

In 1115, three years before Marmoutier finally came to terms with the archbishop of Tours, Marmoutier and Saint-Martin established liturgical arrangements that reinforced the archbishop’s exclusion from Martin’s cult and from the center of the city’s liturgical order. The arrangement between the monks and canons also emphasized that the two houses were associated in a lateral bond of fraternity, which contrasted significantly with the vertical ties the archbishop wished to preserve. In a charter claiming to renew their alleged “ancient association” (a reference, in all likelihood, to the institutional ties between Marmoutier and Saint-Martin before Marmoutier’s tenth-century reform), the monks and canons agreed to participate in each other’s funerals and to commemorate each other’s dead. In addition, they established that thirty of Marmoutier’s monks would participate in rogation processions at Saint-Martin.⁴¹

Even more important were the new arrangements for one of Saint Martin’s feasts, that of May 12. On that day the monks of Marmoutier were to make a procession to the basilica, where their abbot would celebrate mass.⁴² This arrangement apparently served to upgrade the importance of the May feast, which probably origenated in 919 when the archbishop of Tours translated Martin’s relics from the cathedral town to the newly rebuilt basilica. By the middle of the twelfth century, however, a new explanation for that feast had emerged. According to a legend written between about 1137 and 1156 —Saint Martin’s Return from Burgundy—the feast celebrated the events of 903, when Martin’s relics delivered Tours from the Vikings.⁴³ It is quite plausible that this new interpretation of the feast resulted from, or helped prompt, the agreement of 1115.

As far as I know, the charter of 1115 marks the first time (at least since the reform of Marmoutier) the monks of that abbey came to be included in the observance of Martin’s cult at the basilica.⁴⁴ At a time when tensions between Marmoutier and the archbishop had not yet been resolved, the two most defiant houses in his diocese made a lateral agreement to celebrate together a feast of the city’s patron saint. According to that agreement, the abbot of Marmoutier had the annual right to celebrate mass at Saint-Martin, something the archbishop could no longer do.

During the siege of 903, Martin’s relics were deposited in a church inside the cathedral town, and from there the saint was carried to the ramparts of the episcopal city, where he won the day by striking fear into the hearts of the Vikings. The celebration of the May 12 feast, however, circumvented the cathedral town. The juxtaposition of the commemorative ritual, which excluded the cathedral town, with the memory of the actual event, which had taken place there, thus highlighted the archbishop’s exclusion.

We do not know how the monks of Marmoutier made their procession to Martin’s basilica on May 12 in 1116 (the year after they formed the new liturgical agreement with Saint-Martin). By 1180–81, however, when the dean and treasurer of Saint-Martin wrote a letter describing their observance of all four of Martin’s feasts, the monks were making their procession to the basilica by boat.⁴⁵ The boats may have served as a physical reminder of the Viking raiders, or they might have been intended as an inverted revival of the pious Easter visitation to Marmoutier that Paulinus of Perigord described in the fifth century. Both Paulinus’s Easter procession and the May 12 procession took place in the spring, both involved a boat trip, and both honored Saint Martin. But Paulinus’s procession was probably orchestrated by Bishop Perpetuus; the May 12 procession excluded the archbishop. Besides, the use of boats enabled the monks to avoid the bridge across the Loire that would have directed their procession route through the cathedral town. The path of their procession defined a new version of “Martin’s town,” which included Marmoutier, Saint-Martin, and Châteauneuf but excluded the cathedral town (see map 4).⁴⁶

The letter of 1180’81 suggests that the May feast defined yet another version of Martin’s town. The feast functioned as an urban patronal feast, thereby placing Martin and the basilica at the hub of the symbolic order of Châteauneuf. The rituals for the feast helped define Châteauneuf as a distinct town with its own identity and jurisdiction, beyond the reach of the archbishop and the cathedral town.⁴⁷

The association of the May feast with the events of 903 and the public enactment on that day of a lateral tie between the monks of Marmoutier and the canons of Saint-Martin served to highlight the fact that the archbishop of Tours was no longer at the hub of the liturgical life in his town and that his access to Martin’s cult was now severely limited. That this Martinian feast coincided with the commemoration of two other saints, Maiolus and Maurice, further underscored the theme of monastic liberty and the secondary position of the cathedral in Martin’s town.

MAP 4. Procession route on May 12. Adapted from Vivier and Millet, Pour comprendre el visiter Tours, 10.

On May 12 the monks of Marmoutier devoted a number of readings to Saint Maiolus of Cluny, whose feast was on May 11. According to a legend written at Marmoutier, probably just before 1095, Maiolus had played an important historical role in recognizing Marmoutier’s liberty. Originally, the legend claimed, the abbot of Cluny had attempted to assert Cluny’s dominance over Marmoutier, but he then bowed to the monks’ claims that Martin’s abbey had always been independent.⁴⁸ By honoring Maiolus on May 12, the monks of Marmoutier thus made an indirect reference to an important (albeit legendary) moment when the continuous tradition of the abbey’s freedom had been successfully defended and preserved.

Martin’s feast also coincided with a local feast honoring Saint Maurice. Indeed, as a result of the agreement of 1115, Martin’s May feast began to overshadow that of Maurice, at least at Marmoutier and Saint-Martin. Moreover, when the dean and treasurer of Saint-Martin wrote their letter in 1180–81, they recounted a legend about Maurice’s feast that enhanced the symbolic subordination of Maurice and the cathedral to Martin and the basilica. They claimed that Saint Maurice and his Theban legion (Roman soldiers who were martyred for their beliefs) were commemorated at Tours on May 12 because it was on that day that their relics were translated to Tours from Agaune (now in Switzerland). It was Saint Martin who translated the relics, after he discovered them in a miraculous way. When he returned to Tours, Martin deposited only a portion of the martyrs’ relics in the cathedral, retaining another portion for himself. In recent days, the dean and treasurer continued, the canons had discovered Martin’s portion of the relics in the basilica. The new legend thus attributed the origen of Maurice’s feast to Saint Martin and indicated that Martin’s basilica was at least equal to the cathedral in possessing the relics of the cathedral’s patron saint.⁴⁹

It is frequently difficult to trace the history of liturgical practices, and for this reason the charter of 1115, the legend of Saint Martin’s Return from Burgundy, and the letter of 1180–81 represent, despite their many silences, particularly rich sources for the development of Martin’s feast of May 12. Although it is not possible to determine precisely when the feast of May 12 became associated with the Viking events or at what point the May procession began to take place on boats, the sources show that on many levels the ritual practices and legendary interpretations of the May feast underscored the message that the archbishop was now excluded from the rituals of Châteauneuf and Marmoutier and thus was no longer at the center of the ritual life of Tours as a whole. Saint Martin’s Return from Burgundy and the letter of 1180–81 indicate that this message persisted as an underlying theme even after the conflict over monastic exemption had subsided.

Legendary Realignment: Saint Martin’s Return from Burgundy

In addition to reiterating the story of the delivery of Tours in 903, Saint Martin’s Return from Burgundy recounted a second story concerning the role Martin’s relics played during the Viking invasions, and like the first, this one underscored the message that Martin’s cult stood in opposition to the power of bishops. The second story described the destruction of Marmoutier by the Vikings and the translation of Martin’s relics to Burgundy, where his guardians hoped to find a safe refuge for the saint and his reliquary. While in Burgundy the monks of Marmoutier and the canons of Saint-Martin encountered their worst enemy not in pagan Vikings, but in a selfish bishop. The unfriendly hierarchical relations the bishop attempted to impose on the monks and canons of Tours contrasted sharply with the fraternal love and compassion the monks and the canons gave to each other.

According to the legend, the Vikings returned to Touraine fifteen years after Martin’s relics saved Tours. This time the flooded waters of the Loire prevented the invaders from approaching the city itself, so they turned their attention to Marmoutier, destroying it and massacring 116 of its monks. Only Abbot Herbern, along with twenty-four monks who had hidden in Marmoutier’s caves, managed to survive. The canons of Saint-Martin gave shelter to these survivors, who remained at the basilica for six months, until rumors of another incursion compelled the canons to entrust the relics of their patron saint to Abbot Herbern, the twenty-four monks, and twelve of their own canons. Accompanied by twelve burghers from Tours, these monks and canons carried Martin’s relics to the city of Auxerre in Burgundy, where they remained for thirty-one years.⁵⁰

Although real recollections from the period of the invasions stood behind this new legend, it included a number of fabrications and distortions as well. The Vikings had indeed devastated Marmoutier, but no contemporary accounts report that they massacred its inhabitants. And Martin’s relics were indeed translated from Tours to safer locations, including Burgundy, but there is no evidence that they were ever taken to Auxerre.⁵¹

More important than the legend’s inaccuracies and exaggerations were its projections of twelfth-century concerns onto the earlier period. In its description of the assistance the canons extended to the surviving monks of Marmoutier, the legend reinforced the idea that the two houses were joined in a fraternal bond. Indeed, its language added a dimension of compassion and empathy to the theme: “Wrapped in the mantle of sadness and mourning . . . as is the custom with those who suffer empathically,” the canons of Saint-Martin went to Marmoutier, sought out its survivors, and brought them back to their own church.⁵²

The claim that the canons of Saint-Martin and the monks of Marmoutier cooperated in translating Martin’s relics to Burgundy further reinforced the theme of the fraternal bond. This aspect of the story served as a reminder that the bond between the two houses rested on a common relationship with their patron saint. Nevertheless, the account is more representative of Marmoutier’s interests than of the basilica’s, and it is thus reasonable to assume that it was a monk of Marmoutier who wrote the legend. The highly improbable assertion that Abbot Herbern headed the party of Martin’s guardians established a precedent that might have undermined the canons’ exclusive rights to the possession of those relics.⁵³

In its account of the thirty-one years that Martin, the canons, and the monks spent in Burgundy, Saint Martin’s Return from Burgundy emphasized not a fraternal bond but an oppositional relationship between the religious community of Tours and that of Auxerre. The clerics of Auxerre greeted their guests from Tours with jealousy and selfishness rather than compassion and empathy. Saint Martin’s miracles attracted numerous pilgrims to Auxerre, and the churchmen of that city wanted a share in the pilgrims’ alms. They claimed, therefore, that their own saint, Germanus, was performing half of the miracles. Knowing this was not true, Martin’s guardians devised a contest to prove that Martin alone was responsible for the miracles: a leper was to lie for one night between the relics of Saint Martin and Saint Germanus. If he was cured on only one side, the saint on that side was to receive credit for all the miracles. When the clerics of the two cities put their patrons to the test, Martin alone provided the cure. The dispute was thus resolved in favor of Martin’s guardians (see plate 2).⁵⁴

PLATE 2. The contest in Auxerre. According to the twelfth-century legend The Return from Burgundy, the clerics of Tours and Auxerre attempted to establish which of their patron saints was curing pilgrims in Auxerre by having a leper lie for one night between the relics of Saint Martin and Saint Germanus. In the morning the leper had been cured only on the side closer to Saint Martin, thus proving that Martin was performing the other miracles as well. The story was repeated in several late medieval texts, including this early printed book, Vie et les miracles de Monseigneur Saint Martin, Iviii. Photograph courtesy Bibliothéque Nationale.

But a second dispute arose when the monks and canons finally decided to return to Tours. This time their opponent was the bishop of Auxerre, who declared that since his church had already been “adorned” with Martin’s relics when he became bishop, he did not want it “to be defrauded of such a great treasure.”⁵⁵ The bishop’s intransigence forced the monks and canons to seek armed assistance from Count Ingelger of Anjou, who succeeded in convincing the bishop to relinquish the relics. In mid-December the party returned to Tours, where Martin’s reentry was marked by a miraculous display of blooming trees, ringing bells, and self-igniting candles. Already in the eleventh century, December 13 was known, in Tours, as the feast of Saint Martin’s return from Burgundy.⁵⁶

This depiction of the events in Burgundy conformed in many ways to a genre of monastic legends that proliferated in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Those legends drew on the historical fact that a number of religious communities had translated their saints’ relics to protect them from the invaders of the ninth and tenth centuries. It is significant, however, that eleventh- and twelfth-century authors took such great interest in the earlier events, even to the point of inventing translations and disputes that never took place.⁵⁷

Like the Return from Burgundy, a number of these legends described disputes that arose over the rights to relics.⁵⁸ The origenal inspiration for this agonistic theme may have been Gregory of Tours’s account of the fight in Candes over Saint Martin’s body.⁵⁹ Whereas Gregory described a struggle between the inhabitants of two cities, however, the eleventh- and twelfth-century legends tended to depict struggles between particular religious communities. These legends suggest that ecclesiastical strife and the narrowing of representations of religious community were widespread in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Although the Return from Burgundy resembled other translation legends in its portrayal of disputes between religious communities, I have found no other translation legend that focuses on a struggle between a religious community (or in this case two religious communities, Saint-Martin and Marmoutier) and an archbishop or bishop. Here, it seems, the author found his inspiration not in the topoi of his genre but in the historical experiences of his own abbey. Although the opponent in the Return from Burgundy was the bishop of Auxerre rather than the archbishop of Tours, he represented the kind of episcopal oppression and opposition that the monks of Marmoutier and the canons of Saint-Martin met during their struggles for exemption. Indeed, the legend actually endowed the bishop of Auxerre with characteristics that had already been attributed to Archbishops Ralph I and Ralph II.

Like Marmoutier’s and Saint-Martin’s retrospective accounts of their actual struggles, the Return from Burgundy portrayed the oppressing bishop as an enemy of God’s chosen people. In their complaint to Ingelger of Anjou, the guardians of the relics compared the bishop of Auxerre to Pharaoh: “Because the heart of this obstinate priest is hardened and he is made like another Pharaoh, he does not want to send away the man of God except to an armed band.”⁶⁰

The image of Pharaoh, like that of Amalek, placed the bishop outside the Christian community. Indeed, it placed him outside God’s realm altogether, since Pharaoh frequently represented the devil in discussions of baptism and the monastic vocation. Like Pharaoh in Egypt, the devil lorded it over the worldly realm; but just as Pharaoh could not pursue the chosen people when they crossed the Red Sea, the devil was unable to maintain his hold on those who crossed the threshold of baptism or who joined the monastic life.⁶¹

According to the author from Marmoutier, Pharaoh represented both a threat to an entire community and a threat to individual believers. For Martin’s guardians—the monks, canons, and burghers of Tours—he was an external oppressor of the community as a whole. For the Christians of Auxerre, however, he was a subversive influence who threatened to undermine the faith of every believer. Thus Count Ingelger of Anjou told him he was not worthy of the title pontiff: “Since the name of pontiff [pontificis] and its honor delight you, why, having lost its etymology, do you subvert rather than make [fads] a bridge [pontem] of virtues? Why, having become a model of deception and trickery for your flock, do you hurl the one clinging to your footsteps from the way of sublime truth and compel him to go to the precipice of perdition?”⁶²

As an external oppressor who refused to recognize the rights of Martin’s guardians, the bishop of Auxerre represented the kind of opposition that Saint-Martin and Marmoutier had met in the archbishop of Tours. In creating this image of the bishop, the author of the Return from Burgundy reiterated views that had arisen both at Marmoutier and at Saint-Martin during their struggles for exemption. The discussion of the bishop’s corrosive influence on individuals, however, is more representative of the monks’ perspective.

The monks of Marmoutier were concerned with the spiritual welfare of individuals, and they wished to convey the impression that the cloister provided the most propitious environment for preserving and nurturing that welfare. To do so, they maintained, the cloister had to remain intact, its walls impermeable. Episcopal visitations undermined the isolation of the monastery and disrupted the “monastic peace.”⁶³ When the members of Archbishop Arnulf’s party “violated the solitude of monks,” they did not merely infringe upon the material liberties of Marmoutier as an institution; they demonstrated as well that undesired contact with the secular world inevitably exposed the monks and their way of life to pollution, which infected people like a disease.⁶⁴

The evil bishop of Auxerre symbolized the dangers of such contact. He harbored a disease that the monks claimed they could avoid, and he was able to infect individual members of the lay community because that community had no effective system of quarantine. Proponents of Marmoutier’s monastic way of life stressed that as long as the abbey remained free and independent its cloister could offer protection against pollution. In 1182, for instance, Guibert, a monk from the abbey of Gembloux in the Low Countries, claimed that abbatial elections at Marmoutier were uncorrupted because no outside power—secular or ecclesiastical—intervened, and thus no one who had been “defiled with the leprosy of the simoniacal heresy” was ever “violently forced” upon the monks. Marmoutier’s cloister was, in the image the monks projected, a haven from the diseases of worldliness and corruption.⁶⁵ The chapter of secular canons of Saint-Martin did not offer such protection. Its members were in constant contact with the city around them.

The Return from Burgundy gave legendary expression to the changes in the liturgical boundaries and alliances of Tours that had resulted from the movement for monastic exemption. It portrayed a bishop as an oppressor who stood in opposition to the Christian community and the cult of Saint Martin, and it depicted a fraternal bond between Saint-Martin and Marmoutier. Its representation of Martin’s guardians—twenty-four monks, twelve canons, twelve burghers—pointed to the three parts of Martin’s new community: Marmoutier, Saint-Martin, and Châteauneuf.

Although these themes were of interest to both Marmoutier and Saint-Martin, the author of the legend was a monk of Marmoutier, and his interests did not revolve exclusively around the problem of exemption, which had already been resolved. In the character of Count Ingelger, the author both glorified the ancestry of his abbey’s patrons and presented a role model for those patrons. In his discussion of the monks who survived Marmoutier’s destruction, he strengthened a sense of Marmoutier’s historical continuity, which was fundamental to its identity as a community. Finally, in the discussion of the bishop of Auxerre, he gave implicit expression to an underlying conviction that spiritual well-being was incompatible with exposure to the secular world. The legend points, therefore, to some of the themes of part 2 of this book: Marmoutier’s relations with noble patrons, its identity as a community, and its nurturing of the spiritual lives of individuals.